


blow all my friendships to sit in hell with you

by hotgirl



Series: you're the only one here [1]
Category: Thoroughbreds (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Pining, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotgirl/pseuds/hotgirl
Summary: "It would be sad if our Lifetime movie didn't make you cry," she says like she remembers every word from that spring. — amanda/lilyor: lily reads every letter, and that’s her downfall in the end
Relationships: Amanda/Lily (Thoroughbreds)
Series: you're the only one here [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085162
Comments: 20
Kudos: 54





	1. autumn

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from lorde's [the louvre](https://genius.com/Lorde-the-louvre-lyrics)
> 
> [link to play script in case u don't get the references to it](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sZEoDjlPWNQOWnKwWAh7b05S6bmdF7Pp/view)

Amanda turns twenty in a psychiatric facility in New Canaan. Her roommate kills herself that day. She tells Lily about it in another unanswered letter, which doesn’t bother her. Why would Lily reply? Even when they were eight, she was image-obsessed. Always smiling at adults and nodding sweetly at everything. Sometimes Lily was better at faking feeling how she was supposed to than Amanda.

Four days after Amanda’s twentieth birthday and seven months before Lily’s, Lily gets the letter—the one about the dead roommate. She locks herself in her bathroom. She reads it. She memorizes it. She throws it away. This is the pattern she’s settled into.

Most of the time Amanda is rambling about her life now. She seems... happy. (Or as happy as Amanda can be. Or as happy as anyone in a psychiatric facility can be.) But sometimes, every so often, Amanda will talk about what happened, but she'll never say anything to incriminate Lily.

Amanda said she thinks she  _ loved _ her once—her heart never skips a beat, but her stomach dropped when she saw that word in Amanda's shitty handwriting. How she thinks she might  _ still _ love Lily. It was the first and last time she wrote about why she did it. 

It hasn’t come up since.

Lily keeps reading the letters anyway. Even when they detail Amanda's breakfast that day and quote Richard Siken and Shel Silverstein in the same breath. Lily reads them all, waiting for another explanation. The one she really needs. It's been almost three years and it's never come, so Lily tries her best to not keep thinking about the letters once she's taken everything she can from them.

She doesn't stop thinking about this one. For a week, she sits through lectures and absorbs nothing. Amanda's roommate is dead. Amanda's roommate is dead. Amanda's roommate is dead. 

She books a Greyhound to New Canaan on Thursday.

**/**

She sits next to a quiet girl clutching a copy of some bad YA novel to avoid conversation and closes her eyes. She doesn't sleep at all.

During visiting hours, she's signed in. The receptionist doesn't recognize her from the news coverage surrounding Mark's rather untimely murder, and they ID her, so she doesn't bother giving a fake name.

The visitor sticker feels like a target as she's escorted to see Amanda for the first time since her sentencing.

Amanda looks up from her newspaper. Lily stops breathing. Well, that implies a conscious decision. It's more like someone wraps their hand around her throat and chokes the air out of her.

They stare at each other, silent and full of something Lily can't place, for the longest minute of her life.

Then: "... Did you get my letters?" Amanda speaks casually, as if she never drank the drugged up screwdriver. As if they're two old friends catching up over overpriced coffee after a long and busy semester that kept them apart. Lily wishes they were.

"O—of course," she replies, a flicker of a smile finding her lips.

"Did you read them?"

"I did. They were... lovely," she grasps the pendant of her necklace and twists it.

Amanda's eyes follow Lily's hand as she speaks again, "I wasn't sure if you read them. You didn't reply." She's not mad. Lily hadn't expected her to be mad. "I'm glad you liked them. Or at least, I’m assuming you liked them."

"I did," Lily whispers, immediately. Urgently. "I'm sorry I didn't write back."

Amanda shrugs and flips the paper over to the comic section. "It's fine. I didn't expect you to. I missed you, though," she says.

Oh. Lily’s chest aches as she realizes Amanda is capable of missing someone. She finally sits down across from Amanda. She wants to touch her somehow. She wants to hold Amanda's face in her hands. Lay down in her lap. Hold Amanda's hand close to her heart. She settles for a breathy "I—I missed you too."

Something like mild surprise crosses Amanda's eyes. She blinks once and licks her lips. They look somehow drier after. "You're not lying," she quips. "I thought you would lie to me. To be polite."

"I'm done lying to you," Lily murmurs.

"So it seems," she agrees.

They stare at each other for a long minute.

"Are you happy now?" Lily asks, too unmeasured and too unruly.

"I guess," Amanda shrugs, "I mean, I think I was happier with you, but I like this place. I get to paint horses and read most of the day. Sometimes we watch TV. It's a lot of Lifetime and crime shows. I don’t think we should be watching crime shows."

Lily grips her necklace tighter now. She doesn't know what she expected. She read the letters. She read the website for this facility. She knew what Amanda's life was like. She remembers what she said about it before—stop.

No.

Bad Lily.

She doesn't think about what happened to that poor shithead Mark anymore. Besides, Amanda is right in front of her today. Tangible for the first time in almost two years. She shouldn't waste a second on her former step-father.

"You must be reading a lot of poetry. You keep quoting Siken," she says.

Amanda almost smiles. "You noticed."

Lily nods, unsure. "And Silverstein... does  _ The Giving Tree _ make you cry now?" It's not a topic she should push, but she can't help it.

"Now that I understand the tree, I don't think it's a sad story at all, Lily."

She's hit all at once with the desire to run. To pick up everything and leave because she can't bear to look at Amanda and hear the things she has to say and know the things she knows and have done the things she's done.

Amanda asks her how she is before she can. "I mean, you got to go back to Andover, right? Now you must be somewhere nice."

"I did, yes. Um, I'm going to Barnard now," she admits.

"A women's college," Amanda notes, "what happened to Harvard? I mean, Barnard is great too. You get to take classes at Columbia and shit, but you wouldn't shut up about Harvard when we were kids. Did they reject you for cheating?"

Lily stops fidgeting with her necklace. "I got in, but plans change. And why does it matter if I'm attending a women's college?"

"It's kind of a cliché is all," she quips.

"Stop," Lily whispers. She's never wanted to talk about something less. "This isn't why I came," she says, "I just—your roommate killed herself." Her voice chokes and the last bit comes out barely audible.

Amanda knows what she means anyway. "I'm not going to kill myself, Lily," she says, calm and even and honest as ever.

"... You know I didn't mean what I said, right?" If her voice comes out desperate, she doesn't care. "Your life is worth living, Amanda. You're going to get out of here one day, and—and..."

Lily pretends to know a lot of things, but she doesn't know what's going to happen to Amanda when she leaves this place.

Amanda doesn't touch her to calm her. She's never been very good at consoling people, and Lily has always been so overemotional and needy. It's not a good combination, but Lily thought that it worked. Maybe that was her being delusional.

"I don't know if I want to leave. I mean, they filter out all the letters from the true crime community, so I don't have to read weird shit, and the food is pretty good," Amanda says.

"I don't want you to be stuck in here forever," she whispers.

A smile crosses Amanda's lips. It's more genuine than anything Lily has seen on her face before. "You're obviously feeling more about this than I am, and that's fine. I'm not going to hurt myself, Lily. I wouldn't lie to you," she reassures, "I'd hug you, but physical contact is frowned upon here."

Lily wants to reach out and hold Amanda anyway. She wants to tear down the invisible barriers between them and break Amanda out of this facility. She wants to be eleven-years-old again.

She wants, she wants, she wants.

She doesn’t get any of what she wants. Not this time. 

Sitting here, staring at Amanda’s soft smile, she’s not sure if she did last time either.

“This was a mistake,” she murmurs, getting up. She peels the visitor sticker off her blouse and grips her necklace tightly.

Amanda makes a face she barely catches in the corner of her eye. “Why?”

It’s like being shot. Lily stops altogether and breathes. In and out. Slower. She needs to stop showing her heart like this.

“It just was, Amanda,” she chokes out. Her heart hurts. She’s not used to her heart hurting for other people. Empathy was never her strength.

She turns on the heel of her sneaker to leave, but Amanda grabs her wrist.

“Can I still write to you?” She asks, her voice a little less even now. Her eyes a little wounded or maybe desperate. It’s faint, but Lily sees that Amanda is feeling now too.

Maybe that’s why she says yes.

**/**

  
  


A month creeps by. Lily survives Halloween, a Columbia frat party, and some of the most boring lectures in the world.

Amanda writes four letters.

Lily writes one.

“Dear Amanda,” she writes six different times before she likes the way it sounds, “they’re making us into a Lifetime movie. Well, the part of our lives when you did it.” The first time she signs it, she writes a simple “sincerely, Lily.” 

It sounds too impersonal. Almost clinical.

“Love, Lily.”

She hyperventilates for five minutes after writing that.

“Yours, Lily.”

It sounds too personal.

“- Lily.”

… That one is acceptable.

Amanda writes back the next week. All it says is: “Do you think they’ll add lesbian subtext?”

**/**

The next time Lily visits is during winter break. This time, the receptionist looks at her a little funny. She thinks he recognizes her face. She has a distinct face. She tells Amanda that.

Amanda leans back in her chair and says, “of course he recognized you. I always thought you looked interesting.”

She scoffs, offended, “that’s so rude.”

“Interesting is a good thing. It’s why I kept talking to you even when you were kind of bratty,” Amanda shrugs. Then: “Oh. You want me to tell you you’re pretty, don’t you?”

Lily feels her face burn so she averts her eyes completely. “I didn’t say that.”

“I don’t think I should have to tell you you’re pretty. I wouldn’t have kissed you if I didn’t think you were pretty. I don’t want to hurt your feelings though; you  _ are _ pretty.”

Her face burns even more. She doesn’t say anything back to that.

Amanda rolls her eyes. Lily doesn’t see it, but she can feel it in her bones. “I know we never talked about it, but come on. You’re not twelve, and it’s not like it was your first kiss,” she says.

Silence.

“Lily,” she says. There’s no accusation or impatience in her voice. There never is.

More silence.

“Okay. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up,” she concedes

“... Thank you.”

“No problem.”

“Do they celebrate holidays here?” Lily asks, desperate to change the subject. 

“It’s a psych hospital, not an internment camp, Lily,” Amanda points out, “of course, you don’t really care about that. You just feel uncomfortable because you’re not sure what else to say.”

Lily huffs a little. “I hate when you do that,” she says.

“Sorry.”

They’re quiet for a long moment. The TV blares in the background, and Lily stares at Amanda who stares at the TV. It’s a nice moment. Lily just wishes there wasn’t so much space between them.


	2. winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a lot of trouble writing this chapter bc i realized i wasnt totally sure where i want this story to go, but i think ive got it now. im hoping so anyway.
> 
> i also made a playlist for amanda and lily throughout the film which helped. you can listen [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/08PPiV6iZU5Zd2mvNhEHy4?si=vdSqYOD6QMC4S--RdeDXvw) if you want

A week before Christmas, Lily stares blankly at the Christmas card from Amanda's mother. She looks painfully fake to her. Lily wonders how often she sees Amanda. Lily wonders if she hates her daughter. Lily knows it's her fault.

Everything Amanda has done since the screwdriver touched her lips was for Lily. Everything Amanda has suffered since the screwdriver touched her lips was for Lily.

It's her fault the best... _friend_ she ever had is in a psychiatric facility.

But "friend" was never the right word. Not even when they were kids. Lily remembers twelve Christmases ago when she lost a glove, so Amanda gave her one; she remembers the warmth that filled her stomach and the way she wondered if this is what it was to hold the hand of someone you love. She remembers the way she felt almost three years ago when Amanda kissed her--like someone had finally told her what she's wanted this whole time.

She remembers ignoring the feeling and killing Mark anyway.

Some nights she stands by that decision. Others, she wonders if her life would really be that bad if she had just sat there, waiting for Amanda to wake up so she could kiss her again.

Always, Lily knows she's not ready to be... gay. She knows she wasn't ready at seventeen with her head in Amanda's lap like she was coming home, scared and alone and wanting the girl she's wanted to understand her whole life to whisper tender things into her hair. She knows she's not ready at nineteen in her old bedroom on a Thursday morning as she waits for the drug dealer she called out of guilt or karmic fear or something she's too scared to name.

There is no world in which she could have not killed Mark and let herself love Amanda.

So, instead, she waits in the bedroom of her teenage years and feels more alone than ever in this estate. She told the maid, Dorota,--she finally learned her name is--to come to get her when Tim gets here.

Lily waits, and she wilts, and she thinks about Amanda's face with Mark's blood on her cheeks, and she wishes she'd had the courage to talk about it. She thinks maybe if her feelings weren't so suffocating then she would be able to name them.

Tim gets there, finally.

She opens the door, and he looks terrible. The last time she saw him, he was a valet. The last time she saw him, she lied to his face.

"Normally, I wouldn't do a house visit like this," he tells her, his voice haughtier than she thinks he deserves to sound, "what do you want, kid?"

"I'm not a kid anymore," she says reflexively. It's not an invitation, and she hopes to God he doesn't take it as one.

He does. He asks her how old she is, and she feels herself flinch.

"I'm nineteen. Amanda turned twenty in October," Lily adds even though he didn't ask.

"... You still think about her?" Tim asks, nervous. Scared. She thinks he's as scared of her as he is Amanda.

Lily purses her lips. She doesn't think he should get to know those kinds of things about her. "She's not a bad person." She doesn't know why it's important for Tim to know that. She doesn't know why she isn't at Amanda's mother's home, pleading with her to believe her daughter isn't a monster.

"She cut a man's head off," he says, and this makes her flinch.

Even if Amanda had cut Mark's head off, who is Tim to judge her? Tim is a fucking child rapist. Who is he to judge her?

"She wasn't dealt a fair life. She was working harder than you or me to be good. _She was_. She still is." Lily wonders if maybe she's begging him to believe that she's not a bad person for doing what he thinks Amanda did. She wonders if she's capable of loving someone else the way Amanda might love her. She wonders if she deserves to be loved the way Amanda might love her.

There's a long moment where they both just breathe, and Tim looks like he's doing mental gymnastics. Then: "she wrote you again?"

This is not his business. This is not going the way she wanted it to. This was a terrible idea. Maybe everything Lily has ever done in her life has been a terrible idea.

"Can I buy some ketamine from you or what?" she asks instead of answering him.

"Shit. That's a pretty serious drug. What are you gonna do with it?" he asks.

She crosses her arms to create a barrier between the two of them. "I'm going to let loose," she tells him. Maybe she'll kill one of her horses. Maybe she'll make herself understand how Amanda ended up in such a fucking mess. Maybe she'll kill herself.

She won't.

She's too scared to do anything like that. Killing Mark was a one-time thing. It was to protect herself and her future. There's no way she's capable of that again. That's what she tells herself, at least.

She hopes to God it's true.

Tim sells her ketamine that she's too scared to ever try, and before he leaves, she tells him one last time that Amanda wasn't a bad person. She considers telling him that she's the bad person here.

Lily wishes she was angrier than she is so that when Amanda wrote to her, she'd really thrown the letters out. She wishes she didn't need closure still. She gets drunk alone in her room that night.

**/**

On Christmas day, Lily goes to New Canaan. Amanda smiles at her in surprise, but she sits with her at their special Christmas dinner like they're thirteen again. Lily wishes she could give Amanda a present, but she ruined that.

"I saw Tim," she admits.

"Why?" Amanda asks, her brows furrowed.

Lily plays with her mashed potatoes instead of answering until Amanda looks ready to move on from that topic, then she admits, "I wanted to tell him you're a good person."

That seems to surprise Amanda, even if just a bit.

She keeps talking when Amanda says nothing. "I got a Christmas card from your mom, and it made me feel shitty to see her. I think I wanted to tell her you're a good person, but he was easier to talk to. I saw your mom before I left for school, after the trial, and I didn't know how to talk to her. I think maybe I also wanted to convince someone that I'm a good person too." It feels like word vomit. Lily has never been this honest with anyone in her life, but she knows Amanda won't tell anyone. She knows that she can trust Amanda with her life.

"I don't think good people exist," Amanda says slowly, "I don't think we can categorize people as just good or bad, Lily. You're not a bad person, but you've done bad things. And I'm not a good person, but I've done good things. That's just how life is."

Lily can't breathe. She understands what Amanda is saying, and it makes sense, but she wants to be categorically good so badly.

"Thank you for trying," Amanda says after a painful moment, "and thank you for visiting me today. My mother said she couldn't stand to see me in this place on Christmas,--she's always been weak-willed like that--so it means a lot that you came."

"Of course I came," she says breathlessly. "I love you," she doesn't add. She hopes she doesn't have to. She keeps the picture of them riding horses as kids in her wallet now. "I'll come for New Years' too if your mom doesn't."

Amanda smiles at her, and it's genuine. She's been doing that lately. It's Lily's favorite sight, even if she doesn't say it. Amanda knows by now that Lily doesn't say a lot of things. She doesn't lie anymore, but she omits the truth whenever it comes to the way she feels about Amanda.

**/**

Lily keeps her word. She tries to convince the staff that a glass of champagne to celebrate won't hurt Amanda, but she fails.

Amanda is just glad to see her.

**/**

Winter break ends, and Lily heads back to Barnard. She starts to write Amanda even though she sent the last letter between the two of them. The first Friday back, her roommate invites her to a party, but she declines. Says she needs to work on this paper. The paper is the letter.

She signs it "yours, Lily" this time.

Amanda doesn't comment on that in her reply.

This time, Lily responds to almost every letter Amanda sends her.

**/**

In mid-February, a girl from her biology class runs into her as she's picking up Amanda's latest letter. She has a heart attack trying to hide the sender's name and address. Nobody can know that she's talking to Amanda again. Nobody can know that she's seeing Amanda again.

People here know who Lily is, and they know why Amanda is in a psychiatric facility. They would ask too many questions, and Lily would have to tell too many lies.

She runs to her dorm as soon as she can. She ignores her roommate too.

Maybe this isn't healthy, but she can't cut Amanda out of her life again. She missed her too much. She's almost ready to admit why she missed Amanda so much. She tells Amanda that she thinks she wants to talk about the kiss now.

Amanda asks her if she dreams about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my tumblr is 3nin now if u wanna check out my thoroughbreds tag or talk to me abt thoroughbreds or anything


End file.
